About the Lee Vining WebCam View
The Lee Vining WebCam is installed in the Mono Lake Committee's attic vent and originally was zoomed-in on the view of the lake between the streetlight and the tree. We called it the Mono Lake WebCam. When we installed the second WebCam at the Scenic Area Visitor Center, with a spectacular view of the lake, we panned out the first WebCam and ended up with more or less the shot you see today. We began calling that one the Mono Lake WebCam and this one the Lee Vining WebCam.
The vehicles you see on the left are parked at Shelly's Union 76 Service Station. The parking lot to the right of the tree is next to the Gateway motel. In the distance are Lee Vining Creek, Mono Lake, Black Point, Gaines Island, Negit Island, and the Bodie Hills.
At first we had a few complaints about the dumpster, the large amount of asphalt, the tree being in the way, the power line, and the cars, so at one point we began moving the cam around, getting different zoomed-in shots, all the while intending to let people vote for their favorite view and finally put the issue to rest.
The vote happened informally: during this time, we got lots of emails asking us to give back the old view. One person eloquently described it as a "real life view of civilization in nature". We got many more of these emails than those complaining about the prior view. Due to popular demand, we abandoned our voting plan and returned the cam to the current view.
On January 11, 2005, after 82 inches of snow in 15 days, we moved the cam slightly up and to the right to address complaints about the streetlight (glare at night) and snow building up in the bottom 1/4 of the image.
The Lee Vining WebCam is twice as popular as the Mono Lake WebCam, which implies that people are looking for road conditions, or people and cars moving around, or some sort of action. People come from far away to see the cam and stand in front of it. We are happy that most of you love it.
And we still have the Mono Lake WebCam to satisfy the desire for a natural scene.
Thank you for viewing our WebCams. We appreciate your
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